Get Shorty: A Novel: Elmore Leonard: 9780062120250: Amazon.com: Books Elmore Leonard Page 1 of 1 Start over Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon.com. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here . Carlos the Ant (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 4) John Ellsworth USA Today Bestseller John Ellsworth is burning up the Amazon charts. See why the Michael Gresham series made John Ellsworth a household name! The Law Partners (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 3) John Ellsworth USA Today Bestseller John Ellsworth is burning up the Amazon charts. See why the Michael Gresham series made John Ellsworth a household name! Marriage Can Be Murder (Dr. Benjamin Bones Mysteries Book 1) Emma Jameson First in a nostalgic cozy mystery series set in 1939 England. Handsome young Dr. Bones moves into a haunted house and must solve a murder.

Descent Into Hell by Robert Thomas Robert Thomas Angelic Edward quickly becomes the family's nightmare.Once an innocent child, he is now a serial killer looking for his next thrill.Can he be stopped? Kindle Edition The Sweet Smell of Murder (A Chocolate Centered Cozy Mystery Book 1) Cindy Bell If you like chocolate, a fun murder mystery and lovable pets, you will love this culinary cozy mystery! Ad feedback Special Offers and Product Promotions Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Taking his latest fictive turn in Hollywood, Leonard, whose oeuvre includes screenplays as well as such bestselling novels as Glitz and Freaky Deaky , adds insider knowledge to his signature humor in this roundly satisfying behind-the-scenes tour of filmdom. Slightly disaffected Chili Palmer, a small-time loan shark with big-time style, is a vintage Leonard hero. Following a bad debt from Miami to Las Vegas and on to Beverly Hills, Chili hooks up with Harry Zimm, once a leading director of grade-B horror flicks, now trying to make a comeback. While succumbing to the siren call of celluloid, Chili also narrows in on the bad debt, in the process running up against a sharp-dressing hood with whose money Harry has played too loose.

In Leonard's seamless handling, the complex plot flows through twists of revenge, murder and romance, as Chili, his authentic cool making a mark in the capital of sham ("Don't talk when you don't have to" is his very un-Hollywood motto), cagily gets it together with Karen Flores, Harry's former lover and featured star. A perfect resolution puts punch in the title and will keep readers smiling for days. Chili and his story are Leonard's best yet. First serial rights to Rolling Stone; BOMC and QPB selections; major ad/promo, author tour. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. “The greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever!” (The New York Times Book Review) “An absolute master.” (The Detroit News) Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Ignite your imagination with these editor's picks from Kindle books.

See more Product Details Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (November 29, 2011) Language: English Shipping Weight: 8 ounces ( View shipping rates and policies ) Average Customer Review: HALL OF FAME on January 18, 2000 Format: Paperback With Elmore Leonard we get a new book every year or so, and it's a good thing, because even though not every one is a solid success, they are all fun and every now and then a real masterpiece emerges. I believe that Get Shorty is such a success. It's a Cinderella story as if written by Damon Runyan. Chili Palmer, a small time mobster on the trail of a deadbeat who has run off with $300,000 of mob money after faking his own death, finds himself in Hollywood getting involved with movie making instead of recovering the money. On one level the book is pure Leonard an exciting underworld story with great street talk and those edgy characters that he does so well. On another level the book is a wonderful social satire and, with its shift from Vegas to L.A., shows us a contemporary world lost in greed and seduced by show biz.

Palmer's easy success as a producer (in essence doing his own life story) is a thinly veiled commentary on the shallowness of Hollywood and the lack of skill of many of its leaders. Not a surprising position for a writer who has seen almost all of his books (till this one) made into truely terrible movies (remember Stick? Mr. Majestek? The Moonshine Wars?). Whatever else, this book is a fast paced and entertaining piece of fiction. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is memorable and funny, and the plot is ingenious and leads to a very satisfactory conclusion. This is Leonard at his best - and that is awfully good. And surprise, this time he even got a good movie out of it! Elmore Leonard: Crime novelist who wrote 'Get Shorty' and '3:10 to Yuma' dies at 87 | Daily Mail Online comments Elmore Leonard, the beloved crime novelist whose acclaimed best-sellers and the movies made from them chronicled the violent deaths of many a thug and con man, has died.

Leonard, winner of an honorary National Book Award in 2012, died Tuesday morning at his home in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit, from complications of a stroke. His researcher Gregg Sutter announced the 87-year-old’s death and said that he was surrounded by family when he died. His millions of fans, from bellhops to Saul Bellow, made all his books since 'Glitz' (1985) best-sellers. When they flocked to watch John Travolta in the movie version of 'Get Shorty' in 1995, its author became the darling of Hollywood's hippest directors. And book critics and literary lions, prone to dismiss crime novels as mere entertainments, competed for adjectives to praise him. Scroll down for video Passed on: Elmore Leonard, pictured here in September 2012, died on Tuesday due to complications from a stroke His more than 40 novels were populated by pathetic schemers, clever conmen and casual killers.

Each was characterized by moral ambivalence about crime, black humor and wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of Armand Degas in 'Killshot,' the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in 'Get Shorty,' Jack Belmont's lust for notoriety in 'The Hot Kid.' LEONARD HITS THE BIG SCREEN: HIS BOOKS THAT BECAME FILMS 3:10 to Yuma Get Shorty The Big Bounce Touch Stick Jackie Brown 52 Pickup Out of Sight 'When something sounds like writing, I rewrite it,' Leonard often said; and critics adored the flawlessly unadorned, colloquial style. As author Ann Arensberg put it in a New York Times book review, 'I didn't know it was possible to be as good as Elmore Leonard.' Leonard spent much of his childhood in Detroit and set many of his novels in the city. Others were set in Miami near his North Palm Beach, Florida, vacation home. One remarkable thing about Leonard's talent is how long it took the world to notice. He didn't have a best-seller until his 60th year, and few critics took him seriously before the 1990s.

He had some minor successes in the 1950s and '60s in writing Western stories and novels, a couple of which were made into movies. But when interest in the Western dried up, he turned to writing scripts for educational and industrial films while trying his hand at another genre: crime novels. Old school: Leonard became best known for his crime novels that were adapted for films, like Get Shorty, £:10 to Yuma, and Out of Sight The first, 'The Big Bounce,' was rejected 84 times before it was published as a paperback in 1969. Hollywood came calling again, paying $50,000 for the rights and turning it into a movie starring Ryan O'Neal, that even Leonard called 'terrible.' He followed up with several more well-written, fast-paced crime novels, including 'Swag' (1976). Leonard was already following the advice he would later give to young writers: 'Try to leave out the parts that people skip.' In 1978, he was commissioned to write an article about the Detroit Police Department. He shadowed the cops for nearly three months.

Starting with 'City Primeval' in 1980, his crime novels gained a new authenticity, with quirky but believable characters and crisp, slangy dialogue. But sales remained light. Donald I. Fine, an editor at Arbor House, thought they deserved better and promised to put the muscle of his publicity department behind them. He delivered; and in 1985, 'Glitz,' a stylish novel of vengeance set in Atlantic City, became Leonard's first best-seller. Leonard never looked back. Hollywood rediscovered him, churning out a succession of bad movies including the humorless '51 Pick-up' starring Roy Scheider. Its director, John Frankenheimer, failed to capture the sensibilities of Leonard's work, and his ear missed the clever dialogue. It took Barry Sonnenfeld to finally show Hollywood how to turn a Leonard novel into a really good movie. 'Get Shorty' was the first to feel and sound like an Elmore Leonard novel.

Back in the day: Leonard started his career in advertising but then turned to crime writing, and while he was not initially met with much success, his later work became fodder for Hollywood (pictured in 1983) Then Quentin Tarantino took a turn with 'Rum Punch,' turning it into 'Jackie Brown,' a campy, Blaxploitation-style film starring Pam Grier. But Steven Soderbergh stayed faithful to Leonard's story and dialogue with 'Out of Sight.' Writing well into his 80s, Leonard's writing process remained the same. He settled in at his home office in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, around 10 a.m. behind a desk covered with stacks of paper and books. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and set about to writing — longhand, of course — on the 63-page unlined yellow pads that were custom-made for him. When he finished a page, Leonard transferred the words onto a separate piece of paper using an electric typewriter. He tried to complete between three and five pages by the time his workday ended at 6 p.m.

'Well, you've got to put in the time if you want to write a book,' Leonard told The Associated Press in 2010 of the shift work that was befitting of his hometown's standing as the nation's automotive capital. Leonard had sold his first story, 'Trail of the Apache,' in 1951 and followed with 30 more for such magazines as 'Dime Western,' earning 2 or 3 cents a word. At the time, he was working in advertising, but rose early to work on his fiction before trudging off to write Chevrolet ads. One story, '3:10 to Yuma,' became a noted 1956 movie starring Glenn Ford, and 'The Captives' was made into a film the same year called 'The Tall T.' But the small windfall wasn't enough for Leonard to quit his day job. ('3:10 to Yuma' was remade in 2007, starring Russell Crowe.) His first novel, 'The Bounty Hunters,' was published in 1953, and he wrote four more in the next eight years.

One of them, 'Hombre,' about a white man raised by Apaches, was a breakthrough for the struggling young writer. When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for $10,000 in 1967, he quit the ad business to write full time. Working til the end: Leonard (left) worked on the television show 'Justified' starring Timothy Olyphant (center) 'Hombre' became a pretty good movie starring Paul Newman, and the book was named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the Western Writers of America. Soon, another Leonard Western, 'Valdez Is Coming,' became a star vehicle for Burt Lancaster. But as the 1960s ended, the market for Westerns fizzled. Leonard wrote five more, but they sold poorly, and Hollywood had lost interest. Leonard was born in New Orleans on October 11, 1925, the son of General Motors executive Elmore John Leonard and his wife, Flora. The family settled near Detroit when young Elmore was 10.

The tough, undersized young man played quarterback in high school and earned the nickname 'Dutch,' after Emil 'Dutch' Leonard, a knuckleball pitcher of the day. The ballplayer's card sat for years in the writer's study on one of the shelves lined with copies of his books. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he majored in English at the University of Detroit. He started writing copy for an advertising agency before his graduation in 1950. He married three times: to the late Beverly Cline in 1949, the late Joan Shepard in 1979 and, at the age of 68, to Christine Kent in 1993. He had five children, all from his first marriage. His son, Peter, followed in his father's path, going into advertising for years before achieving his own success as a novelist with his 2008 debut, 'Quiver.' In 2012, after learning he was to become a National Book Award lifetime achievement recipient, Leonard said he had no intention of ending his life's work.

'I probably won't quit until I just quit everything — quit my life — because it's all I know how to do,' he told the AP at the time. 'And it's fun. I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'' Elmore Leonard Dead at 87: Crime Novelist Wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight Elmore Leonard Dead at 87: Crime Novelist Wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight Elmore Leonard Dead at 87: Crime Novelist Wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight More Elmore Leonard, the legendary author behind such books-turned-films as Out of Sight, Get Shorty and 3:10 to Yuma, died at his home in Detroit on Tuesday, Aug. 20, following complications from a stroke. He was 87. His longtime researcher and friend Gregg Sutter announced the news on Twitter and Facebook early Tuesday morning. PHOTOS: Stars we've lost in 2013 "The post I dreaded to write, and you dreaded to read," he wrote on Leonard's official Facebook page.

"Elmore passed away at 7:15 this morning from complications from his stroke. He was at home surrounded by his loving family." The revered crime novelist's stories were often optioned into Hollywood hits, including Quentin Tarantino 's adaptation of his novel Rum Punch, which he turned into 1997's Blaxploitation-style film Jackie Brown, Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 cult comedy Get Shorty, starring John Travolta , and 1998's Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez . His novel The Switch was recently adapted for film by Daniel Schechter and will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as Life Of Crime, starring Jennifer Aniston, Isla Fisher, Tim Robbins, John Hawkes, Will Forte and more. PHOTOS: Stars gone too soon In 2012, Leonard was honored as a National Book Award lifetime achievement recipient, but the author told the Associated Press that he wasn't anywhere near done with his life's work. "I probably won't quit until I just quit everything -- I quit my life -- because it's all I know how to do," he said at the time. "And it's fun.

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'" PHOTOS: John Travolta's family album Leonard is survived by his five children, including son Peter, who followed in his father's writer footsteps and is the author of 2008 crime novel Quiver. Get Shorty: Amazon.co.uk: Elmore Leonard: 9780753827291: Books Elmore Leonard Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: W&N (26 Nov. 2009) Language: English Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 2.2 x 19.9 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description Book Description In Hollywood, home of movies, gorgeous women, players and fast operators - every move you make is a potential scene...

Nerve-shattering suspense, crackling dialogue and scathing wit from 'the hottest thriller writer in the US' [TIME]. From the Back Cover In a novel filled with his signatures – nerve-shattering suspense, crackling dialogue, scathing wit, twisted plot, mad scams and daring surprises – Elmore Leonard proves once again why he sets the standard against which all other crime novels are measured. 'Get Shorty' follows the fortunes of Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark with a talent for making a 'slow pay' come across. His pursuit of a mark who's behind in his payments takes him first to Las Vegas, then to Hollywood and horror-film producer Harry Zimm. It seems that Harry has gambled away $200,000 earmarked for his next production, and his investors, who run a limo-and-drugs service for the Hollywood crowd, will kill to know where their money is. But in the land of make-believe Chili suddenly finds himself forming an uneasy partnership with Harry – in between evaluating screenplays, taking meetings with studio execs, and pitching a movie idea of his own. Who would have thought that successful hood would have the right job skills to make it big in Hollywood?

Now all Chili has to do to reap the rewards is stay one step ahead of a trigger-happy investor who wants him removed from the scenario…permanently. Now a major film starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo and Danny DeVito. Joe Mantegna has starred on Broadway in 'Speed-The-Plow' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross', for which he won a Tony award. His film credits include 'Godfather III, Bugsy, Homicide' and ' Searching for Bobby Fischer'. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. By D Redfern on 22 Nov. 2011 Format: Paperback Chili Palmer is a Miami loan shark, collecting Mob money. When he follows a bad debt to las Vegas, then Hollywood, he finds himself drawn into the movie world, a place where he encounters lowlife and big players in equal measure. Harry Zimm is a b-movie producer who asks Chili to help persuade top star Michael Weir to appear in a new film. Chili, meanwhile, has movie ideas of his own. This is the setup for a very original, very funny and cleverly plotted crime story.

As usual with Elmore Leonard, the entire deal is very cool, with a lot of attitude. Very few authors can write dialogue like this - believabe and memorable throughout, with even the briefest sentence revealing a lot about a character and his or her world. While some writers are intent only on 'functionality of plot', stripping everything away until you have a 'product' that does an 'effiecient' job, Leonard is too good for that. Instead you get the work of a man who loves to write, and who never creates anything less than a memorable experience for the reader. This is not in any way to suggest that he isn't good at plotting a story - quite the opposite. Read any - and I mean any - of his books, and you'll encounter the work of a master who is completely at ease with his craft. This book is a perfect example. Forget issues of whether Get Shorty is fast-paced or takes a while to get going - there are plenty of best-selling titles by worthless authors who can tick those boxes in their sleep. Elmore Leonard sets his own pace, telling a fascinating story with characters that are immediately more entertaining than in most other crime novels. Some people talk about Chandler-esque in regard to Leonard books.

But for me what really sets him apart is the jazzy, cool prose, and his unique way with dialogue. Read more › Books by Elmore Leonard (Author of Get Shorty) Books by Elmore Leonard Average rating 3.75 · 150,840 ratings · 10,102 reviews · shelved 239,870 times Showing 30 distinct works. 3.95 avg rating — 16,200 ratings — published 1990 — 52 editions Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 3.91 avg rating — 7,673 ratings — published 1996 — 51 editions Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 3.86 avg rating — 6,627 ratings — published 1992 — 45 editions Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Refresh and try again.

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Rate this book Clear rating 2.96 avg rating — 2,069 ratings — published 2010 — 26 editions Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 3.58 avg rating — 1,699 ratings — published 1987 — 36 editions Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating * Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more books, click here . © 2017 Goodreads Inc Elmore Leonard dies: ‘Get Shorty’ author was 87 - The Washington Post Elmore Leonard dies: ‘Get Shorty’ author was 87 The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! Crime novelist Elmore Leonard dies View Photos The award-winning writer, who had many of his works turned into movies, died Aug.

20 at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87. Caption The award-winning writer, who had many of his works turned into movies, died Aug. 20 at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87. March 31, 1983 Mystery writer Elmore Leonard sits by his typewriter. The crime novelist, who had many of his works turned into movies, died Aug. 20 at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87. Rob Kozloff/AP Wait 1 second to continue. By Louis Bayard By Louis Bayard August 20, 2013 Elmore Leonard, a masterly crime novelist whose razor-sharp dialogue and indelibly realized lowlifes earned him an unusual mix of mass-market appeal and highbrow acclaim, died Aug. 20 at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87. The cause was complications from a stroke, said his researcher, Gregg Sutter. A diligent, unpretentious writer who worked in relative obscurity for many years, Mr.

Leonard went on to influence a generation of crime writers, whose sales may have eclipsed his but whose adoration of him never waned. His lean, violent stories also served up choice film vehicles for actors including Paul Newman (“Hombre”), John Travolta (“Get Shorty”), George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez (“Out of Sight”), Charles Bronson (“Mr. Majestyk”), Roy Scheider (“52 Pick-Up”) and Pam Grier (“Jackie Brown”). What made Mr. Leonard stand out among other chroniclers of crime and punishment was his voice — laconic, funny, unsentimental — and his ruthlessly coherent vision of life in the lower depths. As described in a 2008 Washington Post profile, Mr. Leonard’s world is “populated by cops who aren’t exactly good, crooks who aren’t exactly bad, and women who have an eye for the in-between.” What galvanizes this gallery of rogues and scoundrels, more often than not, is a scheme — a kidnapping, con job or robbery that will bring quick and easy money.

As it turns out, the money is neither quick nor easy, and the schemes are doomed from the start, spinning down unexpected tangents and threatened at every turn by absurdity. In “Rum Punch” (1992), would-be thief Louis Gara spends so much time crafting his “Do not panic” stickup note that the bank he’s plotting to rob has closed by the time he gets there. In “Switch” (1978), two ex-cons abduct the wife of a rich, philandering builder, only to learn that he has no intention of paying the ransom. (They gain an ally in his wife.) Time and again, bad guys pause in the middle of bad acts for extended bull sessions on music or clothes. Screenwriter-director Quentin Tarantino, who turned Mr. Leonard’s “Rum Punch” into the 1997 film “Jackie Brown,” cited the author as a key influence on his own garrulous movie thugs. Taken as a whole, the Leonard oeuvre serves to demolish the myth of the criminal genius. And yet what his villains lack in intelligence, they make up for in mayhem. Beatings, torture and murder feature prominently in the author’s pages.

The villain in Mr. Leonard’s first bestseller, “Glitz” (1985), is a psychopath who kills prostitutes and rapes old ladies. Mr. Leonard, in marked contrast, was a quiet, reserved, owlishly bespectacled man who lived in the Detroit suburbs and sported Kangol caps and tweed jackets. He had no rap sheet; he never owned a gun; he gave up drinking in his early 50s after his first marriage crumbled. Although critics tended to lump him into the hard-boiled detective school of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, Mr. Leonard resisted the tag of mystery writer, pointing out that his work lacks anything in the way of a puzzle. The mystery was all in the books’ creation. “I develop characters, and I’m not sure where they’re going until I get to know them,” he told the London Independent in 1998. “In fact, I seldom know before I’m halfway through what the thing is about.” Elmore Leonard, the crime novelist behind "Get Shorty," "Jackie Brown," and "3:10 to Yuma" died at 87.

His friend, the Post's Neely Tucker shares memories of their time together. (The Washington Post) For Mr. Leonard, the writing process was an extended audition, in which major characters could be fired if they didn’t sparkle and minor characters might suddenly receive star billing. “If I’m curious enough to turn the pages,” he said, “I figure it’ll have the same effect on readers.” Elmore John Leonard Jr. was born in New Orleans on Oct. 11, 1925. His father, a dealership scout for General Motors, moved the family from city to city before settling in Detroit. The young Elmore was nicknamed “Dutch” after a Washington Senators knuckleball pitcher with the same surname. Mr. Leonard went on to serve in World War II. His bad eyesight consigned him to a job as a store manager for the Seabees, doling out beer for the troops. After graduating from the University of Detroit in 1950, Mr. Leonard married his college sweetheart, Beverly Cline, and took a job with a local advertising agency. He nurtured his fiction habit in private. He woke at 5 a.m.

every morning and churned out pulp westerns for two hours before heading to work. “I’d come down in the dark into the living room — that Michigan cold — and I wouldn’t even let myself heat the coffee water until I’d started writing,” he told People magazine. “I’d write in longhand, one word after the other in pencil on a yellow pad, then rewrite on the typewriter. I’m so damned glad I did it. I studied hard, I worked hard, I learned what I could and couldn’t do. I can’t do description well, so now I don’t do it at all.” In 1951, he published his first short story in Argosy magazine for $1,000. His first novel, “The Bounty Hunters,” came out in 1954. Two of his early stories became popular western movies, “The Tall T” with Randolph Scott, and “3:10 to Yuma” with Glenn Ford (both in 1957), and the latter was remade in 2007 with Russell Crowe. By the end of the 1950s, the western market was saturated, so to support his wife and five children, Mr.

Leonard turned to writing scripts for educational films. Then, in 1967, 20th Century Fox bought the rights to his novel “Hombre” for $10,000. The resulting film, starring Newman as a white man raised by American Indians, was only a moderate box office success, but it gave Mr. Leonard the financial cushion he needed to reboot his fiction. His next book, “The Big Bounce,” the story of an ex-con falling into the clutches of a psychotic young seductress, was rejected 84 times before finding a publisher. It found devoted readers, though, and it placed Mr. Leonard for the first time in his natural milieu — the modern American underworld — while planting the seeds for the outstanding work of the 1970s and early 1980s, including “City Primeval,” “Split Images,” “Stick” and “52 Pick-Up.” This was also a time of personal turmoil for Mr. Leonard. His first marriage ended in divorce, and his heavy drinking was a contributing factor. “I’d been drinking since I was a kid,” he told People magazine, “and for 20 years I was a happy drunk.

Then I started to get wild.” He joined and dropped out of Alcoholics Anonymous three times before he quit alcohol entirely. “I had my last drink at 9 a.m. on Jan. 24, 1977,” he said. “I think it was Scotch and ginger ale.” Two years later, he married Joan Shepard. She died in 1993. His third marriage, to Christine Kent, ended in divorce. Survivors include five children from his first marriage; 13 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Hollywood had long warmed to Mr. Leonard’s taut, dialogue-heavy yarns. “The Big Bounce” was filmed twice. (Mr. Leonard hated both versions.) “Joe Kidd” (1972) featured Clint Eastwood as a bounty hunter tracking a Mexican revolutionary, and “Mr. Majestyk” (1974) starred Bronson as a farmer battling the syndicate. More successful were Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Get Shorty” (1995), about a loan shark who finds little difference between organized crime and the film industry, and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” (1998), in which a deputy U.S.

marshal fights and eventually resolves her feelings for a handsome jailbreaker. In recent years, Mr. Leonard’s work inspired the FX television series “Justified,” with Timothy Olyphant as a federal lawman busting heads in the hill country of eastern Kentucky. Even as Mr. Leonard’s sales figures and box-office receipts mounted, he began winning kudos (much to his own surprise) from the intelligentsia. Walker Percy and Saul Bellow were fans. George Will gave out Leonard first-editions as Christmas presents. Martin Amis declared that “for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.” In 2012, Mr. Leonard received the National Book Foundation’s medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. The author reacted to his cultural enshrinement with a mixture of pride and puzzlement. When a professor rhapsodized about his “patterns of imagery,” Mr. Leonard’s initial response was, “What’s he talking about?” Mr.

Leonard liked to quote the review from a librarian at a Connecticut prison: “While you ain’t caught on with the crack and cocaine heads, you have got a following amongst the heroin crowd.” In truth, Mr. Leonard’s art is plain and seamless enough to escape more than crackheads. He supplies human behavior in all its variety, but he is as notable for what he leaves out: imagery, metaphor, thematic summations, even psychological motivation. Most conspicuously, he leaves out Elmore Leonard. “If I ever show myself in there,” he once declared, “then there’s something wrong.” He expanded on this principle in an essay on writing for the New York Times. Among his injunctions: “Never open a book with weather.” “Avoid prologues.” And, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” His most important rule: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” His ultimate object, he wrote, was “invisibility.” And yet his ear for American vernacular was unmistakably his own. The many hours he spent in Detroit bars, police stations and courtrooms gave him a sense of how people reveal themselves through elision and compression.

In his bare-bones dialogue, even conjunctions and punctuation drop away: “I had a tire iron we could find out in ten minutes.” “I do what she wants, she comes up with something else, I don’t talk to her.” In “La Brava,” a hoodlum tersely accounts for the money from his last heist. “I spent half of it on broads, boats and booze. The rest I just wasted.” Asked to explain his facility with idiom, Mr. Leonard replied: “There is no secret. I listen when people are talking. I listen when they’re talking to each other, and I listen when they talk to me.” entertainment Elmore Leonard obituary | Books | The Guardian Elmore Leonard Elmore Leonard obituary Crime writer known for Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Hombre whose work served as a barometer of modern America Elmore Leonard in 1983. 'Don't say what you see; don't describe what's obvious,' was the mantra he followed when writing his books.

Photograph: Rob Kozloff/AP Tuesday 20 August 2013 11.40 EDT First published on Tuesday 20 August 2013 11.40 EDT Share on Messenger Close When Elmore Leonard's Stick was published in Britain in 1984, one newspaper called it "a fine first novel". At almost 60, the author would have been amused at such an accolade; it was, in fact, his 21st novel, and Leonard, who has died aged 87, had been selling his fiction regularly, occasionally to Hollywood. But the genres in which he chose to work often failed to attract serious critical attention: westerns first, then crime novels set in the contemporary urban hinterlands. Westerns as a literary genre still lack respectability, but the craft and energy of Leonard's crime novels, which include Get Shorty, Out of Sight and LaBrava, eventually made them impossible to ignore. Still, recognition came late: only in 1992 did the Mystery Writers of America grant him its highest accolade, the Grand Master Edgar.

In 2009, his lifetime achievements were recognised by both the Western Writers of America and PEN USA. By then, Leonard's appeal went far beyond generic boundaries. In 1998, Martin Amis , in the course of a somewhat idolatrous interview with Leonard at the Writers' Guild in Beverly Hills, declared him "as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist". He also revealed that Saul Bellow had Leonard's work on his bookshelves. Leonard was born in New Orleans. His father was a General Motors executive whose job entailed a nomadic existence. The family spent the first 10 years of Elmore's life travelling the American south and he retained traces of a southern drawl. After second world war service in the US naval reserve, he graduated with an English degree from the University of Detroit. For 11 years, from 1950, he was employed as a copywriter for a Detroit agency, mostly writing car ads. Interviewed years later, he pronounced adverbs in fiction "a moral sin: I used up all my adverbs when I was writing car catalogues for Chevrolet".

Getting up at five every morning and writing fiction for two hours before going to work, he maintained a decent output without relying on it for an income. After he left the agency, he spent several years providing scripts for educational films, including for Encyclopaedia Britannica films. Here, too, he learned something that stayed with him: "Don't say what you see; don't describe what's obvious." That apparent detachment from an authorial point of view was one of the distinguishing characteristics of his fiction. "I don't want you to be aware of me in my books. I'm not ever telling the story. When you're reading a novel, you don't want people telling you things, you want to see it, to hear it." By 1967 he was selling enough fiction to abandon advertising. He had sold his first story, Trail of the Apache, in 1951. His earliest fictions, whether short stories or full-length novels, were westerns, because, he later confessed, he liked cowboy movies and he hoped to sell to Hollywood.

At first it was magazines that bought his work, not only such pulps as Dime Western and Gunsmoke, but also the more respectable Argosy and Saturday Evening Post. His first novel, The Bounty Hunters, appeared in 1953. Other westerns followed, the titles more generic than the stories themselves: The Law at Randado (1954), Escape from Five Shadows (1956), Last Stand at Saber River (1959). Like most writers of westerns, he relied on movies for much of his imagery, but Leonard had taken the time to do a modicum of fact-finding, about which he would later be characteristically self-deprecating: "I cribbed most of my research. I subscribed to Arizona Highways, a pictorial magazine with stunning shots of the landscape, full of articles about the old west ... Once I'd done my research, I began to sound as if I knew what I was talking about and my stories began to sell." Much later, he would be able to afford to pay professional researchers.

It was not long before Hollywood took note with The Tall T (1957), directed by Budd Boetticher , and 3:10 to Yuma, based on a 9,000-word story published in 1953, and filmed by Delmer Daves in 1957. Dime Western paid him $90 for the piece, and he got $4,000 for the screen rights: a pittance in comparison to the deals that came his way later (not least when the film was remade in 2007 with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale). His 1961 novel Hombre was filmed in 1967 by Martin Ritt, with Paul Newman among its stars, but, although he got $10,000 for screen rights, Leonard realised that the market for westerns was running dry. Surprisingly, given his talent for dialogue, he wrote few movie scripts: among the more notable were The Moonshine War, for Richard Quine in 1970 (he later "novelised" his own screenplay), and John Sturges's Joe Kidd, in 1972.

The latter starred Clint Eastwood, a passable incarnation of Leonard's self-contained heroes. Writing against the grain, he continued to publish westerns, notably Valdez is Coming (1970) and Gunsights (1979). By then he already had a reputation as a writer of distinctly tough crime novels, beginning with The Big Bounce (1969). Others included Swag (1976) and Unknown Man No 89 (1977). These provided Leonard with his true milieu: street-hardened good guys doing battle against mean and fearless bad guys, not in order to restore the moral order, but as the only way to stay alive in the wildernesses of Miami and Detroit, his preferred locations. Later, he broadened his geographical horizons, writing novels set in Cuba and Rwanda, but Detroit and Miami remained his cardinal points. What his writing always showed was a sense of how notions of law and order are in abeyance when men get desperate; and desperation, albeit infused with gallows humour, was the atmosphere Leonard's characters breathed. The more he wrote, the more a streak of sentimentality began to emerge, in part an inheritance of his cowboy writings.

The structural similarity of his crime fiction to his westerns was sufficiently pronounced for City Primeval (1980) to be subtitled "High Noon in Detroit", but the whiff of danger was always stronger than the perfume of romantic love. I met Leonard when he was on the interview circuit in London in 1997. By then his fiction had made him a millionaire, not only through sales of his books but also through the income derived from movie rights: Burt Reynolds filmed Stick in 1985 (Leonard provided the script but hated the movie), while Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown was derived from Leonard's Rum Punch (1992). At the time I met him, Leonard had just finished Cuba Libre, and he enjoyed telling me about his (or his researcher's) studies of 19th-century American obscenities: "cocksucker" was a favoured term at the time, he said, though he hadn't much need to use it; on the other hand, he was particularly pleased to find the word "fly", meaning snappily dressed, in O Henry , when he had thought it 1970s black street-talk.

Those kind of linguistic details were an important imaginative hook on which he could hang a character. Leonard proved an affable talker, filling my allotted hour without effort and then calling a halt gracefully. He had precise recall for names and faces and spoke with fond animosity about the rogues, cheats and charlatans he had encountered in Hollywood decades before. He spoke rather less fondly of some of the films made from his books: of The Big Bounce, filmed in 1969 as a showcase for Ryan O'Neal's winsome good looks, he commented, "I used to say that [it] was the second-worst movie ever made, because there's got to be one worse than that, but I don't know what it would be." Nevertheless he acknowledged that Hollywood had supported his novel-writing for years. He readily admitted benefiting from Hemingway's influence, although not necessarily more than from writing for Encyclopaedia Britannica films. He had a film-maker's eye for setting up a scene and editing the action within it, yet it was his abrasive dialogue that proved his greatest asset: as Tarantino acknowledged, reading Leonard "helped me figure out my style".

He had an acute ear for the stops and starts, the detours, switchbacks and inventive obscenities of conversation. If it felt as if he had simply switched on a tape recorder to catch what he called "the rhythm, the beats", it was in fact the work of a finely tuned imagination. He occasionally used the same character in more than one novel, and admitted to me that his main character was often "the same guy with a different name". That guy was a tarnished hero, usually but not invariably male, unafraid to break the law but with a fundamental sense of decency, if not of legality. Against him ranged the forces, not of law and order, but of chaos and violence. They were invariably embodied in one wrongdoer whose skills in murder, mutilation and mayhem were chillingly refined. Each of these villains was a kind of diabolus ex machina whose predictably unpredictable behaviour permitted the action to unfold with maximum risk to everyone they encountered. They, too, might be essentially "the same guy", but each had special talents: Bobby Deo in Riding the Rap (1995), for example, was a careful gardener who found unusual uses for his secateurs.

To call Leonard's style a formula would be to cheapen it, but when he departed from it, the results were less convincing: Touch (1987) was a bizarre fable reflecting Leonard's own discovery of Christianity and his abandonment of alcohol, while Cuba Libre (1998) was a kind of Cuban western, although Leonard failed to find much life in the 1898 Spanish-American war. Touch, Get Shorty (1990), Out of Sight (1996) and Be Cool (1999) were all adapted for the cinema; Out of Sight also spawned a TV series, Karen Sisco. The US marshal Raylan Givens, a secondary character who appeared in both Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap, later became the focus for the TV series Justified, for which Leonard acted as executive producer. The success of the series prompted Leonard to reintroduce Givens in his 2012 novel Raylan, which in turn borrowed characters from the TV series. He departed from his usual output with the children's novel A Coyote's in the House (2004).

It depicted the tough and often violent lives of a gang of coyotes living on the fringes of human society, or at least of Hollywood. The story shared many of the characteristics of Leonard's crime novels: it was written in a version of his familiar hardboiled demotic, and its coyote characters had names such as Antwan and Ramona, the kind that cropped up in his adult fiction. In 2001, the New York Times published Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing , folksy but well-considered advice, and not only for those who wanted to write like Leonard: "Never open a book with weather", "Keep your exclamation points under control" and so on. He added: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Leonard made it sound easy, but of course it wasn't. He may not have been an innovator, but his best novels were a more accurate barometer of contemporary America than the respectable profundities of "quality" fiction, even if it took the critics 30 years to catch up with him.

Leonard married three times, in 1949 to Beverly Cline (the couple divorced in 1977); in 1979 to Joan Shephard, who died in 1993; and later that year to Christine Kent (the couple divorced in 2012). He is survived by the five children of his first marriage, Jane, Peter, Christopher, Bill and Katy. Peter published his first novel, Quiver , in 2008. It bore clear traces of his father's influence, but he was not the only writer who learned from Elmore Leonard . • Elmore John Leonard, writer, born 11 October 1925; died 20 August 2013 Martin Amis, Ian Rankin and Jackie Collins are among fellow authors and fans paying tribute to the US crime writer Published: 21 Aug 2013 The crime writer known as 'the Dickens of Detroit' has died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke in July this year Published: 20 Aug 2013 Jackie Collins, queen of the sexy thriller, has been hooked on Elmore Leonard ever since she read Get Shorty.

But she has never been able to follow the king of crime fiction's 10 rules for writing … Published: 21 Aug 2013 Acclaimed American writer who praised plain writing achieved literary daring across 60-year publishing career Published: 20 Aug 2013 Elmore Leonard - IMDb IMDb Writer | Producer | Miscellaneous Crew Elmore Leonard was born on October 11, 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA as Elmore John Leonard Jr. He was a writer and producer, known for Jackie Brown (1997), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and Justified (2010). He was married to Christine Kent, Joan Shepard and Beverly Claire Cline. He died on August 20, 2013 in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, USA. See full bio » Born: Famous Directors: From Sundance to Prominence From Christopher Nolan to Quentin Tarantino and every Coen brother in between, many of today's most popular directors got their start at the Sundance Film Festival . Here's a list of some of the biggest names to go from Sundance to Hollywood prominence.

Share this page: Related News a list of 75 people created 22 Sep 2013 a list of 25 people created 26 Dec 2013 a list of 47 people created 03 Mar 2014 a list of 662 people created 01 Jul 2014 a list of 52 people created 03 Nov 2014 Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Elmore Leonard's work have you seen? User Polls 3 wins & 2 nominations.

See more awards » Known For 2017 Get Shorty (novel) ( filming ) Justified (TV Series) (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by - 36 episodes, 2010 - 2015) (based on the short story 'Fire in the Hole' by - 24 episodes, 2012 - 2013) (short story "Fire in the Hole" - 14 episodes, 2014 - 2015) (story - 4 episodes, 2011 - 2013) (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" - 4 episodes, 2011) - The Promise (2015) ... (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by) - Collateral (2015) ... (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by) - Fugitive Number One (2015) ... (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by) - Trust (2015) ...

(based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by) - Burned (2015) ... (based on the short story "Fire in the Hole" by) 2013 The Arrangement (TV Movie) (story "When the Women Come Out to Dance") 2013 Life of Crime (based on the book "The Switch" written by) Elmore Leonard 'was a master' | Books | The Guardian Elmore Leonard Elmore Leonard 'was a master' Martin Amis, Ian Rankin and Jackie Collins are among fellow authors and fans paying tribute to the US crime writer Elmore Leonard. Photograph: Marta Lavandier/AP Close This article is 3 years old Fans and fellow writers have paid tribute to US crime writer Elmore Leonard after he died yesterday , from complications associated with a stroke suffered in July. Award-winning crime writer Ian Rankin told the Guardian: "Elmore Leonard could write hard-boiled and soft-boiled. He could make you laugh at a one-liner and wince at a scene of brutal violence. He could write westerns, crime stories, and political satire. And all of it in the leanest prose imaginable.

In short, he was a master." The style and humour of Leonard's writing won him fans across the globe during a 60-year career in which he wrote 45 novels, including Get Shorty in 1990, which catapulted him to fame when it became a blockbuster film starring John Travolta. In the Guardian, Mark Lawson wrote : "The plots … were largely a mechanism for Leonard to get his characters talking – the literary skill at which he excelled.

A man who insisted that his prose style was achieved by leaving out what fancier writers left in was notable in his dialogue for putting in the things that many novelists left out: the hesitations, repetitions, sawn-off phrases." In the New York Times , Martin Amis said: "To his admiring peers, Mr Leonard did more than merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and lifting it to a higher literary shelf." "Elmore Leonard" was trending on Twitter from early this morning, as fans and writers bombarded the social media site with tributes to the man, his writing and his famously pithy 10 Rules for Writing, originally published in the New York Times and later as a book. TV writer and comedian Graham Linehan, @Glinner, who co-wrote shows Black Books and Father Ted, linked to Leonard's writing advice, saying " how to stay invisible in your writing. Elmore Leonard's rules " . Comedian @SarahMillican75 did the same, "for the writers amongst you", as did @chuckpalahniuk, "'in honour of his passing".

British screenwriter @edgarwright, whose credits include Shaun of the Dead, wrote: "One of my favourite authors has just passed away, the great Elmore Leonard. But what an amazing legacy of crime fiction he leaves behind." While US crime writer Duane Swierczynski, @swierczy, said "RIP, Elmore Leonard . Such an amazing talent and huge influence for so many writers." Bestselling novelist @JackieJCollins wrote: ""Elmore Leonard's book were always raunchy & fun. What a great writer! He will be much missed." "He leaves behind a wonderful legacy of incredible one-of-a-kind characters – and stories that will never grow old," she continued in a Guardian appreciation . And @TonyParsonsUK said: "It is good to see Elmore Leonard so deeply and genuinely mourned.

What is even better is that he knew he was loved even when he was alive." For GQ magazine , Parsons picked out five of his favourite Leonard novels, including Out of Sight, "A typically brilliant Elmore set-up – a prison break in South Florida that throws together a female federal marshal and a legendary bank robber when they are locked in the boot of a car together," and Fire In The Hole, "a collection of short stories that is as good as any short story written by Hemingway or Raymond Carver – and they were damn good". Satirical magazine the Onion posted an obituary in the style of Leonard's prose: "PROLOGUE It was 10 am. when this reporter – stubbly, lean, and careworn – leaned in his chair, scanning the news for topics of interest, and chanced upon the demise of a very great writer. Gripped suddenly by the inspiration to write, he composed, carefully and with no small degree of consideration, the story you are about to read." In the UK, the deputy chief executive of Leonard's publisher Orion, Malcolm Edwards, told industry magazine The Bookseller : "[Leonard] was a great writer and a great figure.

He had a very long, productive career, and he was still writing his best up till the end. He was a consummate professional. We began publishing him in 2005, and we all loved being his publisher. He wrote roughly a book a year since then, and he had a great late success following the TV programme Justified , adapted from his work." The crime writer known as 'the Dickens of Detroit' has died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke in July this year Published: 20 Aug 2013 Jackie Collins, queen of the sexy thriller, has been hooked on Elmore Leonard ever since she read Get Shorty. But she has never been able to follow the king of crime fiction's 10 rules for writing … Published: 21 Aug 2013 Crime writer known for Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Hombre whose work served as a barometer of modern America Published: 20 Aug 2013 Acclaimed American writer who praised plain writing achieved literary daring across 60-year publishing career Published: 20 Aug 2013

Question: Which US author wrote the novel ‘Get Shorty’?
Answer: Elmore Leonard